Have you ever found a definition of aesthetic values that will hold through the whole art miracle? I never have and never expect to. Even in Pater’s _The School of Giorgione_ you are merely told that since all art constantly aspires toward the condition of music, toward that perfect identification of matter and form, the chief function of aesthetic criticism is to estimate the degree in which all the arts approach to musical law. But musical law is constantly changing; and the criterion of the degree to which matter and form become identical will be a sort of sliding scale. And what every one wants to know is how to gauge that scale. Can you think of a single art judgment in the whole realm of aesthetics that you can use as an infallible touchstone; with which you can make a mediocre poet realize why his work is bad instead of good? You can make him realize, by the desperate wildness with which you shriek “It’s not well done”, that something is wrong; but to save your life you can’t convince him that you are talking about anything except your own instinct—as you aren’t; and of course he feels that his instinct may be just as good as yours—which of course it can’t! Suppose you choose one of the best definitions ever thought of,—Mérimée’s “all art is exaggeration _à propos_”; you find that you’re just as badly off as before: by what standard is the _à propos_ measured? * * * * * It was in this frame of mind that I heard Leo Ornstein’s music. First he came one night and played for us alone, on our Mason and Hamlin, in a half light and an atmosphere of intense excitement. None of us had decided beforehand that we should want to laugh or hiss or throw things at him, as they did in London two years ago. We expected something beautiful and we got it. He played his _Impressions of the Thames_, which he afterward described as a river of “towers and turrets and stars, of dark rushing water, of bridges and buildings, of desolate muddy banks, and then something which you cannot bear to look at any longer.” I can’t “see” music, so I only know that it was sound which interested and pleased and shook me. Then he played his _Funeral March_, which had something dark and vast in it; then some Ravel, the music of which interested me more than his playing of it; and finally the Schumann _Arabesque_, which he did so beautifully that I thought “Here is a man who plays just as he wants to, and probably comes nearer to what Schumann would have liked than all the strict interpreters with their flawless ‘taste’ have done.” It seemed to me that Ornstein did what he did with it—stretched its slenderness to a lovelier curve—in the interest of the piano; and that is the very best thing anyone can do with written music for the piano, even if the pedagogues can’t beat time to it. So at the end I was beginning to think: perhaps this is the man who is to bring to the piano that something it still needs.